The telephone as optionally-spoken email. It’s a pretty amazing idea.

Back on the fourteenth of January, I published a bookmarklet to jump to the current day’s stats in Analytics.

This originally used google.com rather than www.google.com. Somewhere around the ninth of February this stopped working. I initially thought this was due to a missing referrer header, but today I discovered the issue was the missing www. I don’t know what changed on Google’s end, but I’m glad to have the functionality back.

The code in the original entry has been updated, so if you’re using this bookmarklet you’ll want to go back there and get the revised version.

Google recently introduced a way to tell their crawler which address variant you want indexed:

Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" />

This is very simple to set up with Tumblr. Go to the customization page, and just before the </head>, add the following code:

{block:PermalinkPage}<link rel='canonical'
      href='{Permalink}'>{/block:PermalinkPage}

This will automatically add the <link> element on pages for individual entries. Index pages (i.e. pages that can have pagination links) will just get a blank line.

The question here is: why use open source firmware, and then prevent customers from taking advantage? At some level, the answer likely involves ‘it isn’t Windows Mobile’ and (more generally) ‘it’s cheaper’.

A restricted approach would be possible, at least to some extent, if all other carriers agreed to have the same limitations. Doing so would effectively leave Android as a less attractive version of the iPhone.

The flaw, however, is that the Open Handset Alliance wants developer-friendlier phones. As pointed out, this will lead to the phones being used on whatever network, which eventually leads to carriers being commodities chosen for quality and service. This isn’t an entirely new thing, naturally, as they’re already forced to market based on goofy features like ‘favorite contacts’, but lock-in is still a definite concern.

Android is good for users and good for developers, but potentially very bad for carriers.